Today's Stories

May 27, 2009

Joanne Mariner
Military Commissions, Round Three

May 26, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Fearful Pride: North Korea's Second Nuclear Test

Mike Whitney
The Next Leg Down: When Deflation Becomes Entrenched

Sharon Smith
Obama and Abortion Rights: What We Learned at Notre Dame

Marjorie Cohn
The Gitmo Appeasment Plan: Obama Buckles on the Constitution

Dean Baker
Waterboard the Fed

Deepankar Basu
Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why?

Fred Gardner
The Vindication of Sgt. Northcutt

Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans for Sale

Josh Ruebner
Rethinking the Costs of Peace

Brian Cloughley
The Man Who Murdered Count Foulke Bernadotte

Website of the Day
The Montana Town That Wants to Become the New Gitmo

May 25, 2009

Diane Christian
Looking at Torture

John Ross
Mexico's Shock Doctrine

Kenneth Hartman
The Trouble With Prison

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu Goes to Washington

Fred Gardner
"War on Pot" Overrides "Support Our Troops": the Punishment of Sgt. Northcutt

Cindy Sheehan
Day of the Dead

Sen. Russell Feingold
Prolonged Detention and the Rule of Law: a Letter to Barack Obama

Sibel Edmonds
Two Sides of the Same Coin: From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps

Franklin Lamb
Der Spiegel Tries Again

Dave Lindorff
Memorial Day in the Land of the Weak and Wussy

Daniel Wolff
Learning to Read in the Pacific Northwest

Website of the Day
Decoration Day

May 22-24, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
How Long Does It Take?

Michael Teitelman
Obama, Torture and John Walker Lindh

Mike Whitney
Credit Default Swaps: the Poison in the System

Ray McGovern
Cheney Breaks the Taboo: Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism

Sonia Cardenas /
Andrew Flibbert
Why We Love to Hate Pirates

Clive Hamilton
Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War: Bush, God, Iraq and Gog

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

Fred Gardner
Sgt. Northcutt's Homecoming

Carlo Cristofori
The Latest AfPak War

Dean Baker
A Friendly Financial Intervention

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah's 57-State Solution

Andy Worthington
A Message to Obama: No Military Commissions; No Preventive Detentions

David Macaray
Democrats Betray Labor: Card Check is Pronouced Dead

Nadia Hijab
What Kind of State?

Franklin Lamb
How Not to Win Votes for Team USA

Ted Newcomen
The Forgotten Casualties

David Ker Thomson
Joy (Or How Hope, the Thing With Feathers, Gets Plucked)

David Rosen
Porn Wars

Mark Weisbrot
Climate Change and Intellectual Property Rights?

Robert Fantina
Gitmo, Democrats and Business as Usual

Heather Gray
Some Positive Directions in Public Health?

Farzana Versey
The Myth of Manmohan Singh

Chris Genovali
A Paler Shade of Green

Ron Jacobs
His Terrible Swift Sword: the Legacy of John Brown

Jay Diamond
Why the Left Should Cheer Hannity and Limbaugh

Dr. Susan Block
The Binds That Bond

Ben Sonnenberg
"Ballast": An Endlessness of Almost Ending

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost ... Again

Lorenzo Wolff
My Problem with Led Zeppelin

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Bohm

Website of the Weekend
Bob Graham's CIA Notebooks

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

May 27, 2009

Obama and the Bully Pulpit

Overcoming the Poverty of Ambition

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Presidents, and especially former presidents, sometimes say things that will surprise you.

One of the most surprising to many people, and one of the most thematically consistent, is the insistence of their claim to the weakness of the office.  In making that complaint, I believe it was Lyndon Johnson – one of the most powerful of American presidents, and the one who accomplished, for better or worse, far more than most of his colleagues in the position – who said in frustration something along the lines of, What can I do?  The only power that I have is the bomb, and I can’t use that’.

This consistent theme is remarkable for a variety of reasons, not least including the fact that these very same occupants join the rest of us in describing the office as the most powerful position on the planet.  And they are – again, for better or worse – accurate in saying so.

What explains this conundrum is that the president sits atop a country that is head and shoulders beyond every other country in the world in terms of economic, military, political and cultural power.  That may well not be the case in 2050, but it is now.  To take just one simple example, consider that the United States spends about $1 trillion per year on its military.  If you take all the other countries in the world – nearly 200 of them – and combine their spending on the military, together they equal about half of that amount.

At the same time the American president leads this incredibly powerful country, the office itself was designed by the Founders to be about as weak as possible – at least during peacetime – without the country falling apart altogether, as it had been doing under the even weaker Articles of Confederation.  Thus, the president’s institutional power is weak, but the country he leads is powerful.  And thus the conundrum of a presidency that seems simultaneously powerful and powerless.

Of course, presidents such as Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and especially the little Bush have massively expanded the power of the presidency, metastasizing it into a monster you’d be tempted to say that the Founders would no longer recognize.  Except, that they would.  It would probably look uncomfortably familiar to them, in fact.  The last George would remind them quite a bit of a George they came to know and hate, so much so that they twisted their new polity into pretzels of constitutional engineering in order to avoid replicating the British monarch.

They succeeded, and they failed.  Not for nothing that we’ve been referring for a generation or two now to the “imperial presidency”.  And, if Dick Cheney had had his way, that phrase would have been shortened by one word, simply to ‘Emperor’.  Building on a foundation established by the other aforementioned presidents, who radically changed the office from the nineteenth century model, Bush and Cheney arrogated more power to the American executive then even Nixon might have fantasized about.  And Barack Obama has so far displayed a somewhat troubling unwillingness to entirely renounce those claims.

In other words, it’s not your great-great-great-great-grandfather’s presidency, I’m afraid.  At the same time, I think we have to honestly say that the framework of the Founders remains remarkably intact, at least when there are men and women possessing the wisdom and the courage to perform their prescribed functions underneath that constitutional design.  To some degree, that is what we have today.  Even the Boy King wasn’t able to sell off Social Security to his Wall Street cronies, try as he might, because Congress said “no”.  He also wasn’t entirely able to run his sham kangaroo court system for detainees in his sham war on terrorism, either, because the Supreme Court said “no”.  And so on.

These are, of course, rather exceptional cases.  Generally, the American judiciary defers to the president with a high degree of regularity, especially on national security issues.  That’s not necessarily a good thing, but in reality, not much has changed in that regard since the founding of the country.

Congress, on the other hand, has shown itself to be more or less a complete disaster.  Republicans are all guts, and no wisdom, while Democrats have none of either.  The GOP has near total party discipline, and uses it to vote like an army of rigid automatons that would make members of the Borg Collective uncomfortable.  When they controlled Congress they gave Bush nearly everything he wanted – only choosing to block him when he wasn’t regressive enough – and they completely abdicated all of their responsibilities in terms of oversight, checks and balances, and good governance in any shape or form.  Democrats, on the other hand, wouldn’t know a profile in courage if it slapped them upside the head.  They took every fat opportunity Bush gave them to do the right thing and stand up for the interests of the American public, not to mention for a little thing called the law, and ran off into hiding instead.

All of that said, a little comparative analysis is still instructive in a big way.  This institution – even under Bush and Cheney – does not resemble Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Kim, Khomeini or Castro.  In truth, it doesn’t even resemble Gordon Brown.  The British prime minister – sometimes accurately referred to as an elected dictator – is a far more powerful institution than the American president.  There are no courts to strike down legislation or executive orders.  There are no states or provinces with which to share power in a federalist system.  There is no written constitution, per se, overtly proscribing certain governmental policies.  And, at least under normal circumstances, there is no separate legislative branch to defy the prime minister, since he or she has, by definition, a built-in majority there.

The simple fact is that America is a hugely powerful country, but there are serious limitations on the power of the American presidency.  And, as it turns out, the presidential power that is often the most significant is not even found in the Constitution.  It’s the bully pulpit.  It’s the power to persuade.  It’s the biggest soapbox in the world.  It’s all that, and actually a lot more.  Because the real power, the serious power, of the bully pulpit is not so much to argue for one position or another in an ongoing debate, but rather to put an issue on the table that wasn’t there before.  And then to frame the structure of discourse surrounding that issue.  Typically, if a president argues that we need to start thinking about something that hasn’t been on the agenda so far, it will instantly be on the agenda from that time forward.  And, typically, a president can also be extremely powerful in shaping the way we think about issues as well, which often constitutes more than half the battle when the issue is ultimately engaged.

I have written three columns about Barack Obama since he was inaugurated in January, including one just a week or two back.  Every one of them has been critical – including one which referred to him as “Obusha” in the title – and if I had to label the Obama presidency with one word so far, it would be “disappointing”.  It’s been this way for me since the beginning of his campaign.  I see his potential to be a great president, particularly given the crises which surround us at the moment, the hunger of the American people for honest leadership, and the near complete implosion of the Republican opposition.  And yet, I also see him consistently failing to act boldly.  Worse, he too frequently carries forward the horrific agenda of his predecessor, sometimes even exacerbating it.

And yet, every once in a while he does something that truly impresses me.  I think the first time I noticed this was his Philadelphia speech on race, which struck me as the most mature, adult conversation a president (or candidate) has had with his country in my lifetime.  In truth, I guess a lot of what he’s done that I’m impressed with has taken the form of speeches, rather than action.  In fairness, it’s pretty early for that latter agenda to bear fruit.  If he’s serious about national healthcare, leaving Iraq, or shutting down Guantánamo, those are things that cannot be done on short order, and I’m not bothered by the fact that they are only in motion rather than completed, four months into this presidency (assuming, that is, that they do get completed).

One could certainly make a good argument that I’m a naïve fool, easily placated by empty rhetoric, while the president’s real agenda is simply more of the same, only this time presented with a happy liberal face fronting predatory policies, rather than a snarling Dick Cheney.  I certainly can see the merit to that assertion, and I don’t even entirely disagree with it.  On the other hand, however – and this is really significant – it ignores the huge potential power of the bully pulpit.

I was reminded of this once again the other week, as Obama gave the commencement speech to graduating students at Arizona State University.  This is the paragraph that jumped out at me:

“You're taught to chase after the usual brass rings, being on this 'who's who' list or that top 100 list, how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car.  Let me suggest that such an approach won't get you where you want to go.  It displays a poverty of ambition, that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.”

Maybe no one else will remember this one paragraph from this one speech.  Then again, that’s what another president from Illinois said about a certain speech he once delivered, and it, ahem, turned out a bit differently in the end.

We should not underestimate the power of the bully pulpit to shape discourse and therefore, ultimately, both culture and policy outcomes.  This can happen in a direct fashion, but the second, third and fourth level effects are the more interesting and potentially most powerful.  By second level effect I mean the power to place an item on the agenda of the nation, as opposed to the (first level) impact of articulating a particular position on an existing policy question.  By third level I mean the ability to frame the way the issue is considered.  And by fourth level I mean the power to configure the very bounds of legitimate discourse.

For example, on the issue of gay marriage, a first level effect of the bully pulpit would be to take a pro position on the issue.  This alone would have a considerable impact, and Obama has the capacity to cut a decade or two off the time it takes to bring this issue to fruition, notwithstanding the fact that the issue is taking off nowadays quite on its own (and quite without the help of the president).

A second level effect, using this same example, would be for him to use his giant soapbox to make the issue a national priority.  Few individuals have that capacity to the degree presidents do, let alone popular ones.  Two sentences in a state of the union address could immediately move the issue to the center of American political discourse.

A third level effect would have to do with the crucial matter of framing the issue.  The question of the question – Is this an issue of preserving tradition versus one of basic human rights and justice? – is crucial to the ultimate matter of the policy’s political prospects.  To use the most oft-quoted example as illustration, if you call it an estate tax, people support it.  Reframe it as a death tax, and support plummets.

Finally, a fourth level effect of the bully pulpit provides for a kind of uber-framing that has the effect of legitimating or delegitimating certain kinds of discourse around an issue.  Conservatives, following the pattern of Jackie Onasis, have semi-succeeded in redefining Ronald Reagan as some sort of demi-god, to the point where in America only political cranks could possibly have an unkind word to say about one of our greatest presidents.  The fact that he was, in reality, actually one of our most destructive shows the power of this effect.  Moving perceptions that far involves legitimating and delegitimating whole lines of thought.  Imagine, for example, if Obama began a process of characterizing opponents of gay rights as people with a similar moral standing as slave holders, both of whom are profoundly about denying fundamental human rights to others.  Were this ethos to take hold, it would instantly delegitimize the opposing position on the issue, making the legislative victories a cakewalk.

Obama cannot do everything, and without question he has an enormous agenda that has been thrust upon him.  With the exceptions of Lincoln and FDR, I doubt any president has been more challenged walking in the door than this one.  Moreover, it would do no good for anybody should he succeed on issues like gay marriage, but fail on the economic rescue or war crises.  Say hello to President Jeb Bush if that happens.

It’s also absolutely the case that presidents have political capital no less limited than is real capital.  What you spend on winning health care you cannot also spend on Iraq.

But, all that said, what if this president were to use the powers of his bully pulpit to reorient public thinking on major issues as dramatically as he began to with respect to life values in his ASU commencement address?

What if Obama profoundly changed the way we think about international relations, international law, international institutions, and America’s place in the world?  So much of what we get wrong in this domain is premised on the original sin of thinking we are somehow morally superior to the rest of the planet, and therefore entitled to special treatment.  So much of what needs to be done in order to reorient our horrid international politics could be unleashed by a new paradigm with respect to America’s place in the world, and the ensuring rights and privileges we assume should follow from there.  A president could take us very far down these paths with thoughtful rhetoric alone.

If he was able to do this, he could also begin to talk sensibly about military spending, as well, particularly given the profound truth – merely waiting to be uttered again by a high level American official, fully fifty years after Eisenhower originally did it – that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”.

Of course, the military-industrial complex Ike warned against only got massively bigger and infinitely more clever at stealing from the hungry and the cold over the following half-century.  Yet the power to correct this tragedy of greed – there is no other term for it – is magnified in the presidential bully pulpit.  Obama may not be willing to spend the political capital to do so.  Or – more unfortunate yet – he may not believe in the cause.  But were he to take on the role of educator-in-chief on this issue, so much could be accomplished.  It is not 1960 anymore, the Cold War is over, and young people in particular seem especially open to new paradigms at this moment.

Another major theme concerns the equitable distribution of wealth inside the country.  The right has been incredibly successful at fomenting the Ayn Randian construction which worships selfishness in such great glory that it is enshrined in public policy.  the result has been an incredible transfer of money over the last three decades, the decimation of the middle class, and a polarization of wealth that has put us now on par with any well-functioning banana republic one might care to choose.  Obama seems completely disinclined toward moving the country on this issue, even away from the worst extremes of Reaganism-Bushism, but imagine what could be accomplished if he starter chastising the malefactors of wealth for their greed?  Actually, we don’t have to imagine.  It’s been done before, and we already know the salutary effects.

Campaign finance and electoral process is another domain that could produce enormous bang for every buck of political capital spent.  By framing the issue as one of invigorating American democracy, Obama could generate enormous pressure leading to reforms it would be ludicrous to resist, generating wholesale enfranchisement of huge swathes of Americans today effectively blocked from voting.  This could change forever the politics of this country.

Similarly, so much of where we go wrong in America is rooted in our system of campaign finance.  As that screaming radical of the looney left, John McCain, once said, “America gets the best Congress money can buy”.  Lots of Americans get enraged about taxes and pork barrel spending, but in doing so they (conveniently) miss the big picture.  The problem is way deeper and way more fundamental.  If a president were ever to lead on this, we could perhaps break the stranglehold that special interests have, not just on spending, but on policy.  Almost every issue domain in American politics would turn out radically different if special interest’s interests were divorced from policy-making.

There are countless examples of what Obama could do with his bully pulpit but, above all, he must use it to completely reorient thinking (or what has passed for it) in this country on the global warming issue.  This one never ceases to amaze me.  Even the deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic metaphor fails to do justice to the sheer stupidity of American policy on this issue.  As climatologists are now discovering that even their gloomy projections of massively destructive warming were insufficiently dire, my jaw sometimes drops so hard it dents the pavement in the realization that this society continues to allow short-term profits for extremely narrow special interests to continue their campaign of disinformation on the issue.  Or that such-and-such a person’s job – or even a million jobs – stand in our way (falsely, at that) of saving the planet from total destruction.  Do the oil and coal barons have some other celestial body their children will be able to inhabit, of which I’m unaware?  Have they colonized Mars in preparation for the offspring of Shell and Exxon/Mobil CEOs to migrate there?  Are there really human beings so impossibly sociopathic that they would trade entire species for a couple of extra decades with a second or third yacht?  Yes, of course, there are.  And the crisis therefore screams out for presidential leadership on the matter.  Would it be so much for the president to say that these “What, me worry?” lies are, in fact, lies?

Barack Obama remains something of an unknown quantity to the world, even after two years of campaigning and a hundred days of governing.  Both progressives and regressives alike have reasons for satisfaction and disappointment with the guy.  Some in the former category still hold out hope that Obama is a practitioner of three-dimensional chess, that he’s smarter and more patient than the rest of us, and that he will implement progressive policy solutions soon enough, but cleverly, strategically, and deliberately.  This may not necessarily (or, alas, may) be an entirely fantastical exercise in wishful thinking.  Sounding reasonable and centrist while Cheney and Limbaugh push the GOP further toward the edge of the cliff with their insane histrionics, for example, is not necessarily a bad way to eventually move even dumbed-down America in the direction of a thoughtful politics.

Whether Obama ultimately turns out to be the clever progressive in centrist’s clothing, or the plain old centrist (and sometimes out-and-out conservative) in centrist’s clothing is yet to be determined.

What is clear, however, is that among any president’s greatest powers is the force of words, and that few presidents have ever had the rhetorical magic this one possesses.

If he uses this power thoughtfully and courageously, he might in so doing produce more positive impact on the direction of this country than would any bill rammed through Congress, or any redeployment of troops.

Getting Americans to think differently about themselves and their politics is the key that unlocks every door.

Obama carries those keys in his pocket.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. 

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